"Well, now," said Brian, when the servitor had retired, following Theoluf and John Steward out. "Just you and I and Carolinus—where's Carolinus?"
Jim looked. Carolinus had disappeared.
"Something may have come up," said Jim diplomatically. Privately, he suspected Carolinus had never intended to stay in the first place.
"Drink! That's right, James. Get some good, stout wine in you! You'll be happy and astonished with what I have to tell you. I should have come and told you—implored you, even—to come with us in any case; even before Carolinus found us and said you were coming anyway. Could it be you heard about the Prince ahead of time?"
"The Prince?" said Jim. "No."
"Why, he will be at the Earl's Christmastide along with the rest of us. And John Chandos too, and many another worthy person who otherwise might not be there except in such a happy hap. Are you not astonished?"
Jim was. He made astonished noises, for Brian's benefit.
"And Giles de Mer will be there, as I possibly told you he wished to be!" went on Brian. "You remember I had promised him to break a lance with him by way of giving him a chance to learn perhaps a few tricks of lance-work. I was sad to hear earlier this year that there would probably not be a tournament, this Christmastide at the Earl's, because the Earl was—I heard privily—concerned about the expense of it."
"Oh?" said Jim. He had assumed that a tournament was a permanent part of the Earl's Christmas gatherings.
"Yes," said Brian. "The courtyard of his castle is too small for decent tilting, to say nothing of the tents and other necessaries at each end of the lists. Therefore it must be held without the walls—and one can hardly ask those from the lands beyond the castle, but bound to it, to work on feast days, to clear snow, or whatever else is needed to prepare the ground. If they do such labor, some reward has to be given to them, and this has proved somewhat rich in the past—they are almost all free men nowadays, you know, James."
"Yes," said Jim. His own tenants at Malencontri had not failed to remind him of that fact—obligingly and politely, but also both individually and collectively.
"But it seems," went on Brian, "that these same free men, like the true English breed they are, had been looking forward to the tournament as much as the guests. So they have offered to take care of the field out of sheer goodwill. Of course, they will still need in decency to be fed and given drink, and some other benefits, as well as a place before all the other common people who have come to glimpse the tournament."
"I see," said Jim. "But you say Giles will be there?"
"Yes!" said Brian. "I had a letter from him—well, actually a letter from his sister. Giles is no hand with a pen, perhaps you know. But I have his promise. It will be good to see him again!"
"Yes!" said Jim enthusiastically. He, too, liked Sir Giles de Mer, who had been associated with them in the business of rescuing England's Crown Prince from a AAA magician gone bad.
Giles was a selkie—which was to say he was a man upon the land, but turned into a seal once he was immersed in seawater. His family had some Natural genes, evidently; and Giles had looked, Jim remembered, like a harbor seal when he was in his animal, seagoing form.
Otherwise he was a fairly short, pugnacious young knight with a magnificent blond handlebar mustache, remarkable in a time when most knights were either clean shaven or had a neat, small mustache on the upper lip and something like an equally neat Vandyke beard on the chin.
He was also a Northumbrian, living right on the northern border of England where it touched the independent kingdom of Scotland; and his dream was to do great things in a knightly way. When Giles had heard that Brian not only frequently took part in tournaments, but often won them, he had been understandably eager that Brian should teach him as much as he was able to learn about that sort of rough play. The fact was that, living where he did, he had never been able to take part in a tournament in his life. They were not common along the Border.
Brian was going on to talk about the other people who might be at the Earl's. John Chandos was coming, as part of the Prince's retinue. That retinue would be large, and consequently it was only polite for Brian and Geronde—and now it would only be polite for Jim, too—to hold down the number of retainers he would be taking with him. It required a nice balance between the number required, not only for show, but for protection going and coming. For the Earl would have more dependents of his guests to take care of than could easily be handled. They, too, would have to be fed and housed for the period of the twelve days of Christmas.
"—Since the Lady Angela and Geronde are not yet back," went on Brian, lowering his voice with a glance at the doorway through which the two he spoke of would be coming, "mayhap you would be interested in hearing of the trip to Glastonbury I took only a month and a half ago."
"Why, yes—" said Jim.
"Geronde was with me, but she was not aware of some of the small things that happened along the way," said Brian. "It chanced that at the first inn we stopped, the wife of the innkeeper was not unpleasing to the eye. Naturally, I paid little attention to her; and of course, Geronde was with me. So we went to our chamber and ate there. But, while Geronde went to sleep early, I found myself sleepless; and, rising, went back downstairs for a drop of wine and perhaps some company. There was another knight at the inn that eve…"
Sir Brian rambled on in a low voice; and it soon became apparent to Jim that what was developing was the fact that this other knight had also noticed that the innkeeper's wife was not unpleasing to look at; and that the situation was such that he had somehow gotten the idea—totally erroneous of course—that Sir Brian had also found her so.
"… I cannot imagine what might have given the fellow such an idea—" said Brian.
It was, of course, as Brian went on to point out, quite false.
After all, he was with Geronde, and could see no other woman when she was at hand. But clearly this other knight's idea was becoming more and more fixed in his mind; and things were developing toward the point where the two of them would clearly be stepping outside the inn for a quiet debate with their swords over this issue.
"… Language had been passed, you understand," Brian was saying, "that a gentleman could not overlook. Consequently, I had no choice but to be as ready for swordplay as he. Well, to make a long story short—"
But it was already too late to make a long story short. At that moment Angie and Geronde appeared through the entrance both Jim and Brian had been watching out of the corner of their eyes, came up to the table and joined them—both women wearing that slight look of secret self-satisfaction that usually signaled something accomplished and beyond the point where anyone else could undo it.
"Well, well!" Brian interrupted himself cheerfully, in a rather loud and hearty voice. "Glad indeed we are to see you, ladies! We have been dull and lonesome by ourselves, have we not, James?"
"Yes," said Jim. "Oh. Yes, indeed."
Brian tossed off the last of the wine in his glass and sat up straighter in his chair.
"Well, now," he said. "Here we sit, with matins long past and terce not too far distant. It will be mid-day before we know it unless we are moving. We must overnight in Edsley Priory if we are to reach the Earl's on the day of St. Thomas the Apostle. And if we are not there by then, I shudder to think what quarters may be left to house us. Let us to horse!"
Jim roused himself with a jerk. Terce was the canonical hour that corresponded to nine o'clock in the morning. Not necessarily early when you got up at dawn for matins, the first church service of the day—as theoretically they all had.
"That's right," he said. "I'm going to have to—"
"Everything is taken care of," said Angie.
"Indeed," put in Geronde, in her dainty voice, "Malencontri will be kept in good state while you are gone. The Lady Angela has a good staff of servants; and your escort will be a-horseback, already."
"But don't we have to pack?" Jim stared at Angie.
"All don
e," she said.
It had all been taken out of his hands, again. Well, there was no use protesting. His going to the Earl's was already in train.
"And you too will be able to break a lance with me, once we are there, James!" said Brian happily, as if this was the best Christmas present he could give his closest friend.
Jim managed a sickly smile.
Chapter 4
It turned out they were taking only fifteen of Malencontri's men-at-arms, as well as Theoluf, Jim's squire, who necessarily had to go with Jim on an occasion like this. That made sixteen armed retainers, plus three serving women, two of them for Geronde from Malvern and one for Angie; so that the total—together with the nine men-at-arms from Brian's castle and the twenty-five from Malvern—made up fifty-three extra mouths that the Earl would have to feed.
This would have been straining the Earl's hospitality if they had been the retinue of only a single guest. But altogether they were four such, and gentlefolk of substance, as well; this many followers could hardly have raised objections.
Jim had only the few minutes necessary to dress himself in proper clothing for the ride through the wintry day, together with the chain mail shirt and other light armor that he wore as Brian did for the trip. His best armor followed him on a sumpter horse under the control of one of the mounted men-at-arms.
It was not plate armor, for this was not in general usage here yet; and only the famous or well-to-do had it—men like Sir John Chandos and others around the King himself. But it was adequate to any demands that the twelve days of celebration should put upon it, except that Jim lacked one item for the tournament.
"But I can lend you a tilting helm!" Brian had said cheerfully as they were mounting up. "You can have my best helm, since the old one will do very well for me—and indeed I intended to take two because I foresaw I would need to lend one to Giles."
"You're too good to me," said Jim.
"James!" said Brian with real distress in his voice. "Never say that!"
Jim felt like a dirty dog.
The ride through the wintry day—happily it had stopped snowing—had been pleasant and almost invigorating at first. But by the time they had stopped to eat along the way at mid-day and pushed on through an afternoon in which the decline of the sun matched the decline of their spirits, they were looking forward eagerly to the walls and comforts of Edsley Priory.
"I would say," said Brian, as they stopped to breathe their horses after ascending a long slope through the tangled woods, "we're less than two miles from it, now. The fare they'll be able to afford us, James, will be lenten, indeed, because of course it is the fasting season, that ends with Christmas. But I doubt not that the Lady Angela has added some permissible, but more pleasant foods to our baggage; and I know Geronde has done so—why, what's amiss?"
He stood up in the stirrups, and Jim imitated him. The woods were thick enough ahead so that they could see no real distance into them. But their ears had picked up the sound of a horse galloping back toward them; and a moment later a mounted man-at-arms came into sight, one of the three that Sir Brian, whom experience with trouble had taught to take no chances, had sent ahead as a point-party.
"My Lords!" panted the man-at-arms—one of Brian's, whose name Jim could not remember at the moment—pulling his horse to a sliding stop before them. "We heard a noise off the road to our right; and Alfred, going to see what caused it, found at a little distance another path coming to meet with our road, and there a place where a party had been set upon and murdered. He came back to tell us, I went to see, and we heard again the noise that chilled our bones—the sound we had heard before, like the piping of a bird—but there was none alive there to make. Those dead were a gentleman of some age and a young lady, two common women and eight men-at-arms. All slain. All plundered."
Angie and Geronde, who had been riding close behind Jim and Brian, and talking animatedly up until this moment, now crowded their horses forward.
"Tell me about this noise again!" commanded Angie.
"As I said, m'Lady," replied the man-at-arms. "It was like the piping of a bird, but no living thing—"
"I want to see this!" said Angie.
She and Geronde pushed their horses past Jim and Brian and started down the road.
"Wait, damn it!" shouted Brian, putting his own horse in motion, with Jim half a second behind him. "I crave pardon, Ladies; but hold you where you are."
He and Jim had caught up with them now. The two women stopped; and Brian turned in his saddle to shout back commands to the squires and men-at-arms behind them. With a good dozen armed men, following and enclosing Angie and Geronde, Jim and Brian leading them all, they followed the man-at-arms who had brought the message up the road and into the woods; and so to the place he had been talking about.
There, one other of the men-at-arms in the point-party—who Jim now belatedly recognized as the Alfred who had just been mentioned—was sitting his horse, like a sentinel over the scene of destruction. Not only human bodies, but dead horses, were enclosed in a small open space of snowy ground surrounded by the trees.
"Have you heard it again—that noise?" called Angie, as soon as they broke into the open space.
The waiting man-at-arms turned to look at her.
"Thrice, m'Lady," he said. "It continued for a little time—as long as a man could with good intent begin the saying of his pater noster. I had got as far as 'pater nostros que est in caelis'—"
"When was the last time?"
"But a few moments past, m'Lady. But none lives here." Alfred cast a superstitious glance around the scene of destruction.
It was indeed a scene that would live in memory; but not, Jim thought, one that would be filed with those memories classed as happy.
The path on which the slain travelers had been riding was little more than a trail through the trees, marked more by the hoofprints of their horses than by any other evidence.
Just at this spot it opened out for about thirty yards of length and to a width that might be as much as half that at its widest; and this more or less egg-shaped space was surrounded by closely grown trees. The attackers would have been able to hide mere yards from those at whom they aimed their arrows.
"Everybody listen!" said Angie. "If it comes again we want to find out where it's coming from."
Her voice was tense. Jim's mind, however, was less on the mysterious noise than the scene itself. The black trunks and limbs of the leafless trees, the gray late-afternoon sky overhead and the dead white of the snow gave everything a look like some surrealistic painting.
Clearly, most of the party had been killed outright by the arrows sent from longbows at the extremely short range of the thick brush and trees immediately surrounding, for the shafts had passed with no trouble through the boiled leather jerkins the men-at-arms had worn, though these might have been expected to protect those inside them at more usual ranges.
There had been only eight of those men-at-arms—a small defensive party to go through woods as wild as these, on such a little-used trail at this time of year when outlaws in woods like this were starving; and sometimes less than human in their hunger and need. The dead had nearly all been killed instantly; and the two who had not had taken immediately mortal wounds. Probably they had also been knocked off their horses and unable to get back to their feet before their throats were cut.
In addition to the dead men-at-arms there were four other bodies. One was a tall, thin man in at least his mid-fifties, if not older. He wore plate armor under a jupon with a coat of arms blazoned upon it, but his valuable knightly sword was gone from its scabbard.
His steel cap had fallen off and his graying hair stirred slightly in the breeze coming even now through the trees. Below that hair, his face was oddly calm for a man killed so violently. He, also, had died immediately; for the shaft was through his upper chest in the center. He had an academic-looking face with a high forehead and peaceful blue eyes that now stared sightlessly at the darkening clouds overhe
ad. Only he, and the dead woman next to him, were richly enough dressed to identify them as belonging to the gentry.
The dead woman had not died that easily. The arrow that had taken her had gone through her lower body only, and her throat had been cut after that. She did not lie on her back, as the older man did, and her anguish-twisted face showed her as being no older than her mid-twenties, although she lay on her side, with her face half-hidden in the barely three inches of snow that covered this spot in the thick woods.
Both her gray travel dress and the man's dark red over-robe had been cut and torn—obviously in a hasty search for whatever of special value the two might have been wearing or carrying. The bodies of the rest were undisturbed, except that the boots and weapons of the men-at-arms, like the dead knight's sword, were missing.
"I think they heard us coming, Sir Brian," Alfred was saying to Brian. "Whoever did this did not stay as they usually would to make closer search for anything other than food or valuables that they could snatch up and run off with. When we got to these bodies, they were still full warm—even in this weather."
"Hush!" said Angie. "Everybody listen. If we hear that piping sound again, we want to be able to tell where it comes from!"
She urged her horse forward a few steps beyond where it had halted level with the horse ridden by Geronde.
"Can we be sure of that?" Jim asked. "Wouldn't the bodies stay warm for as much as fifteen or even twenty minutes? It's cold, but hardly that cold."
"The man is right," said a harsh voice somewhat below him. "They ran the moment they heard your men coming. Though I myself had heard them getting closer for some minutes. They were men in tattered clothes, and the whole matter took only a few minutes—then it was all over."